Fluctuating sex hormone levels during the menstrual cycle have been shown to affect functional cerebral asymmetries in cognitive domains. These effects seem to result from the neuromodulatory properties of sex hormones and their metabolites on interhemispheric processing. The present study was carried out to investigate whether functional cerebral…

All linguistic and psycholinguistic theories aim to provide psychologically valid analyses of particular grammatical patterns and the relationships that hold among them. Until recently, no tools were available to distinguish neural correlates of particular grammatical constructions that shared the same content words, propositional meaning, and…

The importance of the left inferior pre-frontal cortex (LIPC) for speech production was first popularized by Paul Broca, providing a cornerstone of behavioral neurology and laying the foundation for future research examining brain-behavior relationships. Although Broca's findings were rigorously challenged, comprehensive contradictory evidence was…

The medial temporal lobes (MTL) play an essential role in episodic memory, and accumulating evidence indicates that two MTL subregions--the perirhinal (PRc) and parahippocampal (PHc) cortices--might have different functions. According to the binding of item and context theory ( [16] and [21]), PRc is involved in processing item information, the…

Two experiments explored eye measures (fixations and pupil response patterns) and brain responses (BOLD) accompanying the recognition of visual object stimuli based on familiarity and recollection. In both experiments, the use of a modified remember/know procedure led to high confidence and matched accuracy levels characterising strong familiarity…

The present study applied the Simon effect task to examine the pattern of functional brain reorganization in individuals with Friedreich ataxia (FRDA), using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Thirteen individuals with FRDA and 14 age and sex matched controls participated, and were required to respond to either congruent or incongruent…

Advances in brain imaging methods and technology over the last 2 decades have opened an unprecedented window into the understanding of the structure and function of the human brain. In this article, the authors describe their investigation of the relationship between maternal support, observed during the preschool period, and the size of key brain…

Mathematical skills are becoming increasingly critical for achieving academic and professional success. Developmental dyscalculia (DD) is a childhood-onset disorder characterized by the presence of abnormalities in the acquisition of arithmetic skills affecting approximately 5% of school age children. Diagnosing students with possible dyscalculia…

Sometimes, the relationship between form and meaning in language is not one-to-one. Here, we used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to illuminate the neural correlates of such flexible syntax-semantics mappings during sentence comprehension by examining split-intransitivity. While some ("rigid") verbs consistently select one…

Socioeconomic status is an important predictor of cognitive development and academic achievement. Late adolescence provides a unique opportunity to study how the attainment of socioeconomic status (in the form of years of education) relates to cognitive and neural development, during a time when age-related cognitive and neural development is…

The association of parental social status with multiple health and achievement indicators in adulthood has driven researchers to attempt to identify mechanisms by which social experience in childhood could shift developmental trajectories. Some accounts for observed linkages between parental social status in childhood and health have hypothesized…

Background: Schooling is considered one of the major contributors to the development of intelligence within societies and individuals. Genetic variation might modulate the impact of schooling and explain, at least partially, the presence of individual differences in classrooms. Method: We studied a sample of 1,502 children (mean age = 11.7 years)…

Recently, several ERP studies have shown that the human language comprehension system anticipates words that are highly likely continuations of a given text. However, it remains an open issue whether the language comprehension system can also make predictions that go beyond a specific word. Here, we address the question of whether readers predict…

The deterioration of performance over time is characteristic for sustained attention tasks. This so-called "performance decrement" is measured by the increase of reaction time (RT) over time. Some behavioural and neurobiological mechanisms of this phenomenon are not yet fully understood. Behaviourally, we examined the increase of RT over time and…

Background: Adaptation is key to survival. An organism must adapt to environmental challenges in order to be able to thrive in the environment in which they find themselves. Resilience can be thought of as a measure of the ability of an organism to adapt, and to withstand challenges to its stability. In higher animals, the brain is a key player in…